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Tuesday, April 4, 2017

READING, 'RITING and 'RITHMETIC by Cheri Kay Clifton

Some of us may recall hearing the historic American song, “School Days.” The song was written in 1907 by Will Cobb and Gus Edwards. It was
about a mature couple reminiscing about their childhood together in primary
school. Best known part of the song was the chorus.

School days, school
days

Dear old Golden Rule
days

‘Reading and ‘riting
and ‘rithmetic

Taught to the tune of
the hick’ry stick

You were my queen in
calico

I was your bashful,
barefoot beau

And you wrote on my
slate, “I love you, Joe”

When we were a couple
o’ kids.

So … what were “school
days” like back in the 1800’s?

First of all, children had to walk to school, usually a distance
somewhere between two to five miles. No yellow school buses, no car-pooling
back then. And no paved roads. Up bright and early, they did their morning
chores, then cut through the woods and fields and walked along wagon trails. A
few may have been fortunate enough to ride a horse. No school cancellations for
bad weather, they trudged through rain and snow.

Like some of us saw on the TV show, “Little House on the
Prairie,” schoolhouses consisted of one room, usually about 20 feet by 30 feet.
Two things were fairly consistent in the room: a large slate blackboard at the
front and a pot-bellied stove in the center.

Most schools provided kindergarten through eighth grade. The
kindergarteners were called, “abecedarians.” Pronounced, “ay-bee-see-dair-ee-uns,”
it means what it sounds like … they were taught their ABC’s.

Teachers were both male known as schoolmasters and female known
as schoolmarms. If a female teacher married, she was expected to quit teaching
since her job then would be to take care of her household and husband. In the
mid 1800’s, female teachers were paid anywhere from $14 to $24 a month, with
the men earning sometimes twice that amount.

The school year was much shorter back then. When the Department
of Education first began gathering data on the subject in 1869 school year,
students attended school for about 132 days (standard year these days is 180).
In rural communities, the amount of days often depended on when they were needed
to help their families harvest crops.

When the children heard the school bell ring, they would enter
by separate doors, one door for the girls and one for the boys. They sat on
separate sides of the room too, often the younger at the front of the classroom
and the older sat at the back. Enrollment could be as large as 30 or as small
as 4.

The children had one hour off from 12:00 to 1:00 p.m. to eat and
play. They brought their “dinners” from home in baskets or metal pails. Their
only drink was water from a bucket that the bigger boys filled from the well or
nearby river many times each day. They all drank from the same tin cup or
dipper. A second bucket of water would be kept in the room for washing hands.

Wooden outhouses were in the back of the school, often separate
for boys and girls. They were known as privies,
meaning private, or the necessary.

In the 19th century, paper was too expensive for
everyday lessons, so schoolchildren wrote on slates, personal-sized
blackboards. Slate is a black type of rock that was cut into thin sheets,
ground smooth, and then set into wooden frames.

Slate pencils made of clay, or a softer kind of slate, were
ground into cylinders and used to write on the slates. In the U.S., slate
pencils were manufactured at least as early as 1844 and at least as late as the
1910’s. Students wiped away their work with a rag after it was checked by the
teacher.

In response to the great wave of immigrant children in the
schools, efforts were made to Americanize students through flag rituals,
national symbols in the classes, English language lessons, civic lessons, and
patriotic songs and theatrical performances. Some slate pencils from the 1880’s
were wrapped with American flag-themed paper. They showed the Americanization
practices used through the school supplies of the period.

Paper was used mainly for penmanship. Until the 1840’s scholars
practiced with ink and quills (goose feathers). When quill tips broke, they
would sharpen the quills with a “pen knife.” Later, scholars practiced with
steel tipped pens that they dipped into ink bottles.

1800’s schoolhouse chalk boards were just a slab of board
or slate painted black. Rocks were used to write on the boards, but they
created scratches and indents in the boards so many teachers decided it was
best to switch to a new invention called “chalk”. Today we have many colors of
chalk. Back then all they had was white chalk, made from limestone.

Reading, good penmanship, and arithmetic, were stressed
more than the other subjects. These subjects have been referred to as the Three
Rs of education– Reading, ‘Riting, and ‘Rithmetic. By adding recitation, an
important element of the reading lesson, teachers would sometimes call it the
Four Rs. With the scarcity of books and paper, much memorization and oral
drilling took place. Students would learn by “rote,” which meant to memorize
and recite. To “cipher” meant to do arithmetic problems, either orally or on
slate boards. To “parse sentences” meant to explain the meaning and function of
each word in a sentence, a precursor to diagramming sentences in the twentieth
century.

While learning was taking place, good behavior and strict
discipline were enforced. Teachers punished those who misbehaved or did not
abide by the rules.

At the end of the school year, children took an oral exam
covering spelling and arithmetic problems, and answered questions on many
subjects. This helped the teacher determine the next year’s level of study for
each student.

One-room schoolhouses remained the
backbone of American education for more than 200 years. By the time of World
War II, the era was waning and the little schools were closed as a trend toward
consolidation began. Most of the early structures have since been demolished,
with some converted into small museums.

9 comments:

My late mother-in-law told me of living in one side of a school while her father was schoolmaster. She was only four when they moved, but she remembers how her mother struggled to keep her younger brother quiet while school was in session so the student's couldn't hear him. I have a photo of her and two of her friends playing house by the house side of the school's steps. She had three older brothers as well.

How interesting, Caroline, to read about your mother-in-law's living in the same building as the school classroom. I had read where buildings were often used for more than classrooms, such as church on Sunday or for town meetings.

I often heard my parents talk about their one room school experiences and how they had to walk through snow sometimes to get there. Except for TV shows like "Little House On The Prairie" and "When Calls The Heart" on the Hallmark Channel, I wouldn't really know what it was like to go to school back in those days. My generation was the first to ride on those yellow school buses and learn in classrooms designed for each grade...thank goodness! Even though my sister and I rode the school bus, we knew most of the kids because they all lived in our community. Things are quite different today. Kids go to school with children from several communities and may not know anyone in their classes at the beginning of the year.I so enjoyed reading your blog, Cheri. It was quite impressive.

And to think, many scholars and country leaders went to these schools. You might think we overeducate today, but I suppose not. Our world is so much more diverse and complicated, a wider world of knowledge is needed. But I do love these old school houses.I began one of my Dime Novels in a one room school:"Students, I shall remind you to walk instead of stampeding out the door like a herd of wild ponies. Let's act like ladies and gentlemen." (Charlotte and the Tenderfoot.)Thanks for the details..another good post to use as a reference.

Ha! Celia, got a kick out of reading that dialogue, words one would certainly hear from a teacher in that place and time. And if one of them didn't behave, he or she would be wearing a "dunce cap" and sitting in the corner of the classroom, a punishment eventually abandoned for being too embarrassing to the students. BTW, the history of the dunce cap is another bit of interesting trivia.

My dad went to a two-room schoolhouse about 2 miles from the house. It was almost a mile just to get off the farm. Each room was barely eight by ten feet. Older students helped the younger students. He carried a dinner bucket. They didn't have school in the worst of winter, during harvest, or at planting time. But they did have two weeks off during the summer and a week over the Xmas holidays. He carried a slate and chalk. He started school in 1909.

He started at age six and not a day before, but he could already read for his grandmother (multi-generational house) taught him. And if you think he was taught with a McGuffey reading book, think again. He was taught to read the Bible. Every household had one.

My father swore his lessons were ten times tougher than anything I brought home. His education only went to the sixth grade. He had to quit to work the farm, but I could bring home advanced calculus problems, and he could solve them. I never understood how he figured them but he did. He thought slide rulers were a means to cheat on the math. :-)